November 7, 2013
11:00 AM (EST)

News Release Number: STScI-2013-52

NASA's Hubble Sees Asteroid Spout Six Comet-like Tails

November 7, 2013: It's not often that astronomers stumble across a celestial interloper that they can
only describe as "weird and freakish." Hubble researchers say they were "literally
dumbfounded" when they took a close-up lookREAD: Junior version of this articleLearn about this story in the Star Witness, a science newspaper available on our sister site, Amazing Space. at an object that lives in the
asteroid belt but superficially looks like a comet. It has no less than six dust tails
that seem to be forming sequentially. The entire structure rotates like a bicycle
wheel with spokes on one side.

One explanation is that the tails formed through a series of impulsive
dust-ejection events. These could have been triggered when the gentle nudge of
sunlight spun up the asteroid to the point where dust is falling off the surface and
into space. Solar radiation stretches the dust into finger-like streamers.